The Next Phase of Healthcare Information Exchange

Today, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick will launch the next phase of healthcare information exchange (HIE) in Massachusetts - “Commonwealth Interconnected:  Mass HIway Query and Retrieve”In Phase 1 of our state HIE project, we focused on the Meaningful Use Stage 2 Direct protocol, enabling transition of care summaries, public health reporting transactions, and labs to flow over a state operated secure infrastructure.In Phase 2, we solved a much harder and more complex problem - the pulling of records in real time from physician offices and hospitals where patients have opted in to disclose their records to other caregivers.This required the engineering of several components*A state wide master patient index for patients who opt in, storing name, gender, date of birth and other demographic data elements*A state wide consent registry indicating the medical record numbers and locations where patients have opted in to disclose their data to caregivers*A portal which enables providers to securely login and view patient medical record locations*A viewer which enables secure retrieval of medical records from organizations which support real time data display*An electronic medical record request system for those organizations which support a request/release by the medical records department workflow.*Full audit trails of all activity - an accounting of disclosuresToday a multi-organizational team will demonstrate an Emergency Department visit by a febrile, confused, eld...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - Category: Technology Consultants Source Type: blogs